


a mouse's bone

by vvelna



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Body Horror, Horror, I suppose, M/M, Spooky Happenings, Supernatural Elements, disturbing imagery, it's all fine in the end though, violent imagery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-20
Updated: 2018-07-20
Packaged: 2019-06-13 14:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15366552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vvelna/pseuds/vvelna
Summary: Dan and Phil are haunted by an unusual culprit.





	a mouse's bone

It began with phantom itches, little flurries of movement across the back of his neck or over his legs. Phil thought maybe it was bugs, and then that thought made him feel it even more, the way thinking a bug was crawling on him always did.

Then he woke up in the middle of the night, surrounded by a heavy darkness, like a solid mass pinning him paralyzed to the bed, and he could feel it again. It wasn’t a bug. It was bigger, and it was crawling around by his back, trying to get under the duvet.

He couldn’t move or speak. He just stared at the back of Dan’s head in front of him. Dan seemed to be sleeping peacefully—blissfully unaware of the intruder in their bed.

He could feel it wiggling its way under the covers, and then he felt tiny claws scrape along the bare skin of his lower back.

The thing was prickly, but also soft. It tickled his skin. It was warm. It was in his bed, it was touching him, it was moving higher up along his back, and then there was a sharp pain in the back of his neck.

He screamed.

*

“It was a just a dream.”

“No, it was real. I felt it. It was crawling around in our bed, and then it bit me.”

Phil rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. He could still feel his skin tingling where the teeth had sunk in.

Dan pushed his hand aside and ran his own fingers over the pale skin. He was struck by the thought that the back of Phil’s neck looked so vulnerable. Delicate, thin, and white—a heron’s neck that appeared so easy to snap from this angle…

“There’s nothing here. No marks or anything.”

“I _felt_ it, Dan.”

Phil twisted around in the kitchen chair, craning his neck to look up at Dan, who was stood behind him.

“I need you to believe me.”

Dan’s gaze flickered back and forth between Phil’s eyes and the rest of his face, taking in the crease between his brows, the thin line of his mouth with its downturned corners, the unwavering intensity of his stare.

“Okay. I believe you.”

Phil could tell he didn’t.

*

“Fuck you, you fucking cock fuck motherfucking shit—”

“Language, Danny! We’re gonna get demonetized!”

“I don’t give a shit you Scrooge McDuck fucking duck-fucker _shit!_ "

Dan tossed his controller down onto the desk. Phil moved his fists in a clumsy little cabbage patch motion.

“Yeeeeee!”

“Oh, go on. I’ll fucking yee your mum, you—”

Dan cut his words off mid-sentence and stared at Phil, who had suddenly frozen up. His fists loosened and one hand dropped into his lap. The other was gripping Dan’s upper arm tight enough to bruise.

“Phil?”

Something had slipped under the hem of Phil’s shirt. It was climbing up his back, claws digging into the skin along his spine.

“Phil, what’s wrong? Phil?”

Dan was struck once more by a morbid thought—the kind that had kept creeping into his brain ever since Phil had woken up screaming a few nights before. Phil looked like a deer, caught in the beam of approaching headlights. His long, thin limbs would break like twigs when it collided with his body…

Phil was shaking him.

“It happened again! It bit me! _Look_.”

Dan felt sick, his mind accosted by visions of a figure that was glitching between being Phil and a deer, lying broken and grossly contorted in a harsh flood of light.

He brought his focus back to the real, living and breathing Phil in front of him. His chin was titled upward, exposing the long line of his neck, and this time there was something to see. A little puncture wound, blurred with a bead of blood.

*

Dan smoothed the plaster over Phil’s skin, fingers shaking only slightly. Somehow he was the one rattled, while Phil seemed uncharacteristically calm.

“I’m just glad we have proof now. Do you think I should go to A&E, though? Do mice carry rabies?”

“Mice?” said Dan, blinking to clear his eyes of an intrusive image of blood flowing in rivers down Phil’s neck, pooling in the hollow of his collarbone.

“Yeah. It must have been a mouse that bit me, right?”

That’s what Phil was trying to convince himself of. That it was just a mouse. It made sense—the soft warmth of its fur, the pinprick sharpness of its claws, the tickle of its whiskers. He knew there were mice in their flat, too. Just a few weeks ago he’d endured one of the most disgusting experiences of his life when he’d touched the soft, decomposing body of a mouse that had drowned in their mop bucket. Thinking of it turned his stomach. The slippery feeling, the way its body yielded too easily, like rotten fruit. He shivered.

“A mouse,” Dan muttered. “Right. Okay.”

“Oh wait! I just remembered something from a nature doc I watched. There’s no rabies here. Let me check.”

Phil pulled his laptop toward him across the kitchen table, and Dan winced at the squeaking sound of its plastic bottom dragging against the surface.

“Yeah, no rabies. Except this one species of bat sort of carries it? But not mice, so I guess I won’t wake up foaming at the mouth and bite your face off.”

Dan wished he hadn’t said that, because then all he could see was Phil dripping frothy white spit from a gaping mouth, eyes so bloodshot the sclera was entirely pink. He scuttled slowly across the floor. His arms had too many joints. They shouldn’t have been able to bend like that.

Phil felt a bit feverish. It was only a little after eight in the evening, but it seemed closer to three in the morning.

He stood up abruptly.

“I’m going to bed.”

Dan watched wordlessly as he walked out of the room, his movements strangely stiff.

*

  
Phil was drowning. He couldn’t swim anymore. His head tilted back. He slipped beneath the surface and the water flooded his lungs.

*

Dan tossed back and forth in bed, the sheets damp with his sweat as he dreamt.

They had a plumber round to fix a clogged drain in the sink.

“Your pipe’s fucked,” he said.

He pulled out a comically large pair of scissors from some unknown place. Then he grabbed the tap and stretched it out, elongating the metal like it was made of putty.

He separated the scissor’s blades and cut through it. It parted as easily as dough, or flesh.

Suddenly the pipe was metal again, gleaming and highly reflective. Dan could see his own face distorted on its surface. The plumber tapped on it with a hammer he was now holding instead of the giant scissors, and something fell out of the severed end, hitting the floor with a wet smack.

It was a hand, pale and long-fingered.

Another, unseen hand wrapped around Dan’s ankle and dragged him through the floor. He landed flat on his back, in bed, awake and staring up at the ceiling.

There was a light on in the hallway, and Phil was gone.

*

Dan followed the trail of light down to the kitchen. Phil was leaning over the sink, his back to him.

“Phil? What are you doing?”

Phil didn’t respond or turn around. He was too busy. He was doing something incredibly important.

Dan walked over to him and blanched when he saw that Phil had his hand down the drain. He was rotating his arm, like he was trying to grasp something in the pipe.

Dan wanted to grab his arm and yank it out of the sink. But he didn’t because he was terrified of what might be at the end of it.

There wasn’t a lot of room for Phil to move his hand around. He could only fit a few fingers in where the pipe narrowed below the drain. Its walls were slick and slimy. He fumbled around and one fingertip brushed against something hard but delicate. It was just out of reach. He strained, trying to push his hand deeper, wishing he could compress the bones of his hand to make it fit into the small space.

He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, and drew his hand up and out, holding tight.

Dan let out a long, shaky breath when he saw Phil’s hand emerge, whole and attached to his body exactly where it should be. Some kind of sink muck was smeared across his skin, but there was no bloody stump to be seen.

Phil turned to Dan eagerly.

“Hold out your hand.”

Dan was reluctant, but he did as he was told. Phil dropped something into his palm.

It was as thin as a toothpick, maybe thinner. Off-white and slightly curved, so light he felt like he wasn’t holding anything.

“What is it?”

Phil beamed at him.

“It’s the left ulna of a mouse.”

Dan stared at him blankly. “The what?”

Phil rolled his eyes. Was Dan just playing dumb?

“The ulna, Dan. It’s an arm bone. This one belongs to the mouse.”

“What mouse?”

“The mouse we killed, Dan! Or really, the mouse that died because of us. One of its bones got stuck to the side of the pipe and left behind.”

“You mean…the bucket mouse? The fucking _bucket mouse?_ ”

Dan had found Phil sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth and flailing his hands so rapidly it was like he was trying to throw the skin off them. It was Dan who had slipped on a thick, yellow, rubber glove and without looking, fished what he could of the mouse mush out of the sink. He kept his eyes averted and tried not to gag as he dropped it in the kitchen trash, then quickly slipped the glove off and let it fall in over it.

They’d taken the trash down to the bins right after.

*

Dan sat on the sofa, arms wrapped around his shins and knees tucked beneath his chin, while Phil paced in front of him, trying to explain everything.

It all made perfect sense to Phil. The knowledge had been bestowed upon him as he drifted underwater in his dream (if it was a dream). The mouse that had died in their mop bucket wasn’t an ordinary mouse, and when it died its spirit became vengeful.

They’d gotten rid of almost all of it—sent it far away in a bin bag and washed it down the pipes—but that one little bone had remained, and they’d be tormented until it was gone.

Dan was having trouble wrapping his brain around the situation, but he’d do anything to stop the mental images that kept being projected on the inside of his eyelids. He couldn’t even blink without seeing flashes of Phil placidly pulling a long, thin bone out of his forearm.

“Okay. I believe you.”

He meant it.

*

Phil wrapped the mouse's bone in a bit of tissue and put it in his pocket. They caught a train to Brighton. Phil was hyperaware of the bone the entire ride. It felt heavy pressed against his thigh—not at all like a little sliver he could snap effortlessly.

They’d left immediately and hopped on the earliest train they could. Dan tried not to fall asleep. He was afraid that if he closed his eyes and let himself drift off, he’d have another nightmare. They might have removed the bone from their home, but it was still with them. In fact, it was closer than it had been before, no longer in their sink, but right against Phil’s body. Only the thin layers of tissue and denim separated it from his skin.

*

By the time they made it to the beach, they were both exhausted. It was a mental exhaustion more than a physical one.

Dan watched as Phil kicked off his shoes and peeled off his socks. He rolled the cuffs of his skinny jeans as high as he could, and waded into the water. He kept going until it reached above his knees, soaking into the fabric covering them.

He fished the little roll of tissue out of his pocket and opened it up carefully, mindful of the wind that could send it fluttering away. The idea was to get rid of the bone, but he wanted to do it with purpose.

He released it from its shroud and let it roll into his palm. He wanted to snap it in half, but that seemed like an unnecessarily resentful act. Instead, he simply spread his fingers and let the bone slip into the gap between them and out of his hand.

Dan watched as Phil turned around, smiling widely. He made his way clumsily toward the shore, nearly falling a few times. Dan met him where the sand met the sea, taking his hand and guiding him out of the water.

Dan didn’t see anything but Phil when he looked at him. There were dark circles under his eyes, and his hair was a mess, and the edges of the plaster on his neck were peeling up. But even when Dan closed his eyes he didn’t see Phil in any sort of peril.

“That was…I never want to do that again.”

“Yeah. Let’s go home,” said Phil. “Unless, you want to stay here for a bit? Enjoy the beach since we came all the way out here?”

Dan slid his hand out of Phil’s and moved it to his upper arm, squeezing gently.

“I don’t mind if we stay in Brighton for a bit, but let’s get away from this beach.”

Phil nodded and they made their way up through the sand, backs to the ocean.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading :)  
> if you liked this, kudos and comments are always appreciated.
> 
> [ tumblr post ](https://velvetnautilus.tumblr.com/post/176096870490/a-mouses-bone-rating-t-word-count-23k-summary)


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